


Never leaving well enough alone

by DarkIsRising



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, But Luke likes what he sees, Determined Luke, Din just wants to do his job, First Meetings, M/M, Pre-Season 1, Through to post season 2, sooooooo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-27 09:41:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30120822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkIsRising/pseuds/DarkIsRising
Summary: orFive Times Din and Luke Met (and one time they never parted)He’s drunk, and he isn’t quite sure how that happened. That’s not true, Luke does remember vaguely how it happened, more or less, and it all started with Han.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 164
Kudos: 479





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my emotional task force [tessiete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessiete/pseuds/tessiete) and [treescape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/treescape/pseuds/treescape) for patching up my insecurities with bacta and duct tape.

1.

He’s drunk, and he isn’t quite sure how that happened.

That’s not true, Luke does remember vaguely how it happened, more or less, and it all started with Han.

He’d been the one that had brought Luke here. He’d said there was a guy with information and the only place they could find him was this one bar on Flausy. Well, they happened to be on the Millennium Falcon, and Flausy was just around the star system from them, so, sure, it made sense that they ought to swing by and find the guy. Get the information.

“Han,” Luke had said when they’d walked in and looked around at the bright lights cutting through the dance floor, the tight press of bodies grinding to the music together, the flirtatious finger waves as they passed by the lower-lying tables. “Han, is this a gay bar?”

When it became evident that yes, this was in fact a gay bar, and Han had in fact brought him here, a few other pieces of this plot had begun to come together. “Was there ever even a guy with information?”

“Not really. Lando mentioned this place. Said it might be a good one to bring you to.” Luke’s legs stopped working and Han had been forced to throw an arm around his shoulder and frog march him the rest of the way to the bar. “Come on, kid, loosen up. You’re too young to be this serious, and I figure the best thing I can do for my dear, sweet, too-serious brother-in-law is get him out of his head for a bit. Get him drunk or laid. Or both, that would be ideal.”

“Does Leia know about this?”

“Whose credits do you think I’m using?” he replies with a lazy grin as he slaps a card on the bar. A droid comes whirring up, towel slung over it’s cybernetic shoulder, and bleats out a question. “Shots. Lots of them.”

Now here he is. Drunk. A tiny glass with a swirling purple drink in it and each one he throws back makes his mouth feel more and more like a spaceship entering hyperspace.

Han is taking his job as Luke’s wingman very seriously. He’s leaning against the bar like rough trade—blaster strapped to his thigh, leather vest gaping open, a knowing slant to his crooked mouth—and every guy that tries to pick him up is nimbly redirected toward Luke. Han talks him up in a voice that is loud enough to carry over the music, but not nearly persuasive enough to do much good.

It would hurt his pride more—that not even Han’s classic bait-and-switch can do much for his dismal love life—but he has purple shots to keep him warm and if Leia is buying, Luke figures it would be rude not to keep ordering them.

“That tin can is checking you out,” Han says, nodding to a dark corner, and Luke lifts his head from counting the drink rings on the bar to find a Mandalorian in full, if a little worn and poorly matching, regalia standing there. 

He’s also wearing a silver helmet with the kind of blacked-out visor that’s impossible to see what he might be feeling or doing or checking out under there.

Luke rolls his eyes. “Ha. Ha. Very funny,” 

“He _could_ be checking you out,” Han says with a shrug. “No way to know for sure.”

“Another round?” Luke calls to the server droid who scurries to obey. “You sure he’s not here for you? Maybe you’ve got another bounty on your head.”

“Ha. Ha.” Han repeats with an eye roll of his own. “Didn’t you hear? I’m respectable now. All bounties on me have been squared away, Leia’s orders. Now I’m just a faithful husband and a soon-to-be doting dad.”

Luke can’t help the hysterical laugh that takes him then, and for that he blames the liquor. He gets a punch to the shoulder for it that is harder than a friendly tap yet not quite hard enough to mean business. 

“I do think Tin Can is checking you out,” Han says a few minutes later, thoughtfully, as he idly rolls an empty shot glass between his fingers.

“Maybe I have a bounty out on me,” Luke says, snorting down into his drink.

As it turns out, Luke does, in fact, have a bounty out on him.

“This is all a misunderstanding,” Luke says standing behind the Mandalorian in the cockpit of his ship as he prepares for take off. 

His wrists are bound in front of him, something he could probably get out of with one well placed thought if he wanted to but, well, Han had been right. He has been too serious lately, too lonely, and there’s something about the tall, aloof type that gets to him. And he can’t get much more aloof than a Mandalorian whose face he has yet to see and who has only said a handful of words between capturing Luke and bringing him back here.

Also, Luke’s been drinking. That might also be part of it.

“So, is that bar like,” he tries to think of a tactful way of putting it, very aware that it’s been a long time since he’s tried this talking to (potentially) handsome men thing. “Do you go there a lot, or…?”

“No.”

Luke waits for him to elaborate but that seems to be all he’s going to get.

“Oh. Well, me neither. It was my first time at that place.” The ship tremors as it leaves the atmosphere and Luke lurches forward. He catches himself on the back of the Mandalorian’s chair with his shins since his hands aren’t good for much in these cuffs. “First time having those nurple shots. Have you ever had a nurple shot?”

No response.

“They’re purple,” Luke says helpfully. “Really, really purple. Strong, too.”

The ship makes a sharp turn and Luke staggers to the side along with it.

“I think I might be drunk,” Luke confesses and the Mandalorian snorts out a laugh, the first sign of an emotion he’s shown yet. 

“You think?” And then because apparently Luke’s luck is holding he tilts his head and keeps talking. “How about you sit before you hurt yourself?”

“Wow,” Luke says as he falls into the copilot seat. “That was like a whole sentence. If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were flirting with me.”

Another snort, but that’s all the answer he’s apparently going to give Luke.

“That’s not a no,” Luke points out.

The silence continues on and the white out of hyperspace starts to lull Luke to sleep which is probably not great for his future escape plans, but he feels himself start to slump over nevertheless.

_Kriffing Han,_ he thinks as he comes ever closer to passing out. _Kriffing nurple shots._

Just as he’s drifting off he hears the Mandalorian say: “It’s not a no,” but he can’t for the life of him remember what they’d been talking about before darkness takes over.

The thing is, if Luke were in his right mind he’d try making a pass at the Mandalorian.

Luke doesn’t have the most sexual experience, but for a farm boy from a nearly uninhabitable rock, he’s done pretty well for himself. He knows he’s got the blond thing going for him and that aw-shucks-I’d-be-delighted-to-go-down-on-you thing, and together that can be a pretty winning combo.

Or at least it is according to the holovids that he used to watch and then swear to Uncle Owen that he had no idea _how_ those charges ended up on their plasticard account. Which is to say, he might not have experienced it all but he’s seen some things and if that one ‘vid ‘Mand-ooooooh!-lorian, vol.9’ had anything to say about it all it would take is the right smile, the right wink, and Luke would see himself bent over the cockpit’s console in no time. 

Instead he wakes up from a dead sleep and manages to turn his head away from the man he’d really like to impress before vomiting nurple shots all over the floor.

“I'm sorry,” Luke moans. “I’m so, so sorry.” 

If the Mandalorian is disgusted at Luke, it's hard to tell with that helmet on.

“I'll clean it up. Just tell me where you keep your supplies and I'll take care of it.”

The Mandalorian doesn’t so much as move from where he’s fiddling with the ship's controls, but still the cockpit door opens behind Luke with a whir. 

“Right, yeah, okay.” Luke scrambles up from his seat to the door. A piercing pain is starting above his right eye that he tries to blink away. “I can figure it out.”

The ship’s compartments are narrow and the lights are flickering just enough to make his nausea even worse, but he’d said he would clean up and so he will. A storage door opens with a snick and Luke is staring at more weaponry than he’s seen in one place since the Rebellion ended.

For the first time since he’s been captured Luke wonders where his lightsaber has gotten to. 

He remembers fumbling for it with fingers that had gone nerveless from the shots, but then the Mandalorian was hauling him away with some sort of cable line and Han was no help at all, laughing himself into a stupor as he leaned against the bar. 

And that’s as far as he can remember.

Luke closes the weapons storage door, turning away a little too fast and the headache is worse now.

He’s wincing, reaching up with his bound hands to pinch at the space between his eyes when he realizes he isn’t alone any more.

“This’ll help with the hangover,” he hears over his shoulder before he’s swung into a carbonite chamber and unceremoniously blasted with freezing gas.

By the time he’s rescued the Mandalorian is long gone, having collected on his bounty, and all Luke has to do is wait out the shivering aftereffects of the carbonite with a bemused Han shape that he can barely see through the hibernation blindness.

Squatting down to where Luke is sprawled across the floor, Han presses the hilt of Luke’s lightsaber into his hand and asks: “Did you at least get his comm code?”

“I didn’t. Even. Get his. Name,” Luke forces out through chattering teeth. 

A warm hand claps him on the shoulder.

“Tough luck, kid. Maybe next time.”


	2. Chapter 2

2.

The next time he sees the Mandalorian is sooner than Luke expects but later than he’d been hoping for. 

He’s back on Tatooine, looking for someone that might know something about a Jedi artifact that Leia’s heard a rumor about. It’s not going well, and he can’t decide if it’s because his New Republic credits are no good here or if it’s that the beings he’s shaking down for intel remember Luke as a scrawny farm kid and laugh every time he tries to press them for information.

Luke is going nowhere useful fast when he catches the gleam of the suns bouncing off scuffed up armor, and he finds that he doesn’t really mind the interruption.

“Again?” Luke asks, straightening from where he’s been leaning against a stucco wall, and he can feel the fringe of his poncho swinging as he moves.

“You gonna run for it?” the Mandalorian asks him, hands hovering over the blaster strapped to his hip.

“Depends,” Luke answers truthfully. “Are you going to freeze me again?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes.”

Luke darts through an alley, scales a wall, runs across six rooftops, but his heart just isn’t in it. At least, that’s what he tells himself when he finds himself hauled toward a ship he’s now seeing at a distance for the first time sober.

“Nice,” Luke says, checking out the gunship with a low whistle, and he means it. It’s a little rough around the edges, much like the Mandalorian that is pushing him up the ramp with a heavy hand to his shoulder, but the bones are all there. “A classic.”

The Mandalorian doesn’t respond.

“Don’t suppose you’d let me take her for a spin? I promise I won’t hurt her.”

Silence meets Luke’s question, but from what he remembers through the nurple haze of their last encounter that’s to be expected. 

Luke takes a seat in the cockpit, eyes carefully averting from the place on the floor that he remembers far too clearly vomiting purple all over with a shock of heat along his cheeks. 

The Mandalorian doesn’t seem to notice, he’s too busy with his pre-flight button pushing.

“I’m a really good pilot. Honest,” he tries again as he makes himself comfortable by drawing his knees into his chest beneath the poncho and throwing his bound arms around them. “Not to brag but I did bring down the Death Star. So.”

The Mandalorian pushes a few more buttons and then they are ascending into the air.

“Never heard of it,” he says at last and Luke has to roll his eyes, muttering: “Of course you haven’t.”

When they finally are well on their way to whatever mortal enemy Luke’s managed to make this time around, the Mandalorian turns in his chair and studies Luke with a long stare.

“Come on. To the back. Let’s go, you know the drill.”

“Look,” Luke says, tilting his cheek on his knee in a way he’s hoping makes him look wide-eyed in an irresistible kind of way. “Maybe we can come to an understanding.”

All that gets him is hauled to his feet by the back of his poncho.

But Luke is prepared this time. He’s done his homework, which is to say he’s tracked down that old holovid, as well as volumes one through eight. So he’s ready for it when he’s led to the narrow storage compartment. Luke presses himself close to the bounty hunter and, licking his lips, lowers his voice and says: “What do you say, Mando? Is that beskar the only thing you’ve got on you that’s hard?”

“I’ve also got a blaster,” he answers and before Luke can cobble something lewd together about that the Mandalorian is pointing a gloved finger in his face and saying: “No.”

“Okay, okay,” Luke sighs. “Look, I just… is there any way we can come to some kind of arrangement here? I don’t mind doing, you know, whatever. I just don’t want to deal with the after effects of that stuff again.”

That and he doesn’t want to have to subdue this Mandalorian and hijack his ship when, really, he’s just out here doing his job. It’s not his fault that lately Luke has been accumulating enemies and bounty pucks as fast as he has.

"It wouldn't be ethical," the Mandalorian says, and with a gentle hand he steers Luke into place.

“So, wait, does that mean if I weren’t in your custody you _would_ be interested?” Luke asks with a grin right before the carbonite takes him.


	3. Chapter 3

3\. 

The third time he sees him, Luke actually gets the drop on the Mandalorian for a change.

He’s working on his X-Wing in a hanger on Mos Eisley, back for round two with this artifact he now has confirmation is definitely, for sure, absolutely, possibly, perhaps still here. Which is the best lead he’s had in weeks, so here he is. Docked in a hangar, repairing the worst of some damage his ship had sustained flying through an asteroid belt. 

Be it the Force that Luke has been learning to listen to these past few years or the sheer dumb luck his childhood friend Biggs used to say followed him around like slime off a Hutt, either way it just so happens that Luke is glancing up at the sky right as a very distinctive pre-Empire gunship cuts through the atmo.

“Keep working on the ‘fighter, Artoo,” he says, sounding reasonably calm though his heart has kicked into hyperdrive. “I need to go see someone about something.”

He hasn’t gone two steps when he’s accosted by the hangar’s once-mechanic now-manager, who’s so pissed her dark, curly hair has reached truly epic proportions around her head. And maybe her moods and her hair aren’t actually connected, but it has always seemed that way to Luke.

“You can’t leave that here.”

“Oh, come on, Peli.” Luke is sure that Jedi aren’t supposed to whine, but since no one is really supposed to know he’s a Jedi—Leia’s orders—he tries to only do Jedi things when his face is covered in a hood.

So instead right now he’s just Luke Skywalker: back on Tatooine for a visit. Which means he’s Luke Skywalker: hapless farm boy about to get a scolding.

“Nuh uh. Don’t give me those big, blue eyes, Skywalker. Two weeks. _Two weeks_ you left me with that thing taking up space in my hangar. Costing me a perfectly good berth while you were out galavantin’ around—”

“I told you I got picked up by a bounty hunter—”

Her nostrils flare as her eyes narrow, but Luke knows from experience that her moods tend to blow over quickly. He just has to stand there and weather it first. Which would normally be fine except there’s a Mandalorian somewhere nearby and if his plan is going to work he’s going to need to get out from bay three-five a lot faster than it’s currently happening.

Luke sighs, posture sinking down until he’s less of the poised, blade-sharpened Jedi he’s been working on becoming and more the boy he’d once been. 

“Yeah and whose fault is that?” Peli Motto’s stance widens, her fists find her hips, and she settles in for the long haul. “Skywalker, you have been a pain in my ass since the day the Darklighter boy pulled you in here to gawk at the ships and it never stopped, not once, in all those years you spent bugging all the pilots with your kriffing karking questions. Now you seem to think all this time later you can show up here with that New Republic stink all over you and with _bounties_ on your moisture farmer head and I’m supposed to let you do whatever you want for old time’s sake? Boy, I know you _must_ be space-addled if you think for one click I’m just going to roll over and _let_ you cost me pay on top of whatever else you’re getting me mixed up in.”

The years he’s spent away from Tatooine dissolve and he’s feeling almost sure that at any minute Aunt Beru is going to be commed to come get her nephew out from underfoot at the hangar _again_.

“I’m really sorry, Ms. Motto,” he says, like he used to be made to say by his aunt, her hand biting into his bicep where she held him as she whispered _be polite_. “I never meant to cause you any trouble.”

“You never do, kid,” she grouses, pulling down the towel that had been thrown over her shoulder to swipe the grease off her hands. “I agreed to let you fix your ship, nothing else.”

“I know, it’s just that there’s someone I’ve gotta go talk to. He isn’t far, just somewhere in the hangar. I won’t be long, promise,” Luke lies easily. “I’ll be back so fast you won’t even know I was ever gone.”

She relents with a scowl and a flap of her greased up towel.

Luke bends over the cockpit to grab his poncho, whispering to Artoo before he leaves: “It’s not going to be that fast, but I’ll be back for you as soon as I can make it.”

Artoo gives a series of concerned clicks and whirs while Luke is throwing his poncho on, running out while behind him he can hear Peli Motto yelling: “Wait. What did he say to you? Don’t roll away from me, droid, I know you understand me.” 

He’s not worried about Artoo giving him up. He knows how to keep a secret. 

Luke sprints through the hangar, dodging the pilots and mechanics and service droids as he goes. There’s a corridor between a few of the docking bays that he remembers and Luke slips into it, emerging out the other side to the bright suns beating down from their perch high in the sky.

His eyes quickly scan the crowd for battered beskar and a sharply hewed helmet. He spots it, and can’t help but grin when he realizes that he’s really done it. For once he’s the one that will be catching the Mandalorian off guard. Luke draws the shadows around him as he steps near, careful not to tip his hand before he’s ready.

The Mandalorian is looking over a speeder as the owner haggles over the rental price. He watches, amused, and when he’s ready he drops his Force cloaking so that as far as the Mandalorian is concerned, he’s appeared out of nowhere.

If there is a way for a man in a helmet to look surprised, well then that’s how the Mandalorian looks when he notices Luke standing there, grinning like the idiot everyone in Tatooine knows him to be.

“Don’t say anything,” Luke says raising his hand and he doesn’t mean to but there might be the slightest push of Force persuasion in his words. He shakes his head, and lets how much he wants this to happen leave his voice. Luke’s not looking to compel anyone into sleeping with him here, not even by accident. “I just think you should know that right now I'm not in your custody.”

“But you’re going to be,” comes the response after a long, assessing moment. His voice through the modulator doesn’t sound threatening, just matter of fact.

“Okay, well, maybe. But right now I’m not.”

“Okay?”

“Right,” Luke agrees, talking fast, his nerves making the skin around his mouth tingle faintly. “So since I’m not _currently_ in your custody I was thinking that it, you know, wouldn't be unethical if we. You know.”

The Chagrian with the speeder quickly cuts his eyes to the side as he realizes with a darkening of his blue skin what kind of conversation he’s suddenly found himself in the middle of. “I’ll just…” he says before clearing his throat and wandering off.

After that it’s just the two of them, alone in a crowd. Luke can feel the weight of the Mandalorian’s gaze as it studies him through the blacked out visor of his helmet. It’s a long silence, and the longer it drags on Luke gets the sinking suspicion that he’s just going to be dragged back to the gunship in cuffs and thrown into carbonite. Again.

“Yeah, okay,” the Mandalorian says at last.

_What?_ “Wait. What?” _Wait._ “Really?”

“Yeah. Come on,” he doesn’t sound particularly eager, but he also doesn’t sound particularly uneager, either.

Luke’s shoulder is grabbed by a gloved hand and he finds himself dragged toward an alley that takes them further from the hangar.

“But the helmet stays on,” he’s warned sternly and Luke nods quickly as he struggles to get his feet underneath himself so he can follow the Mandalorian’s brisk pace.

“I can work with that.”

The alley leads to a street and then they are passing through another alley.

When they finally emerge they are in a part of Mos Eisley that Luke has seldom been in. Here there is a thrum of danger in the air and a spill of blood in the sand. Even at high noon there are drunks staggering about, the flash of blaster fire settling scores, and sex workers plying their wares from shaded alcoves.

Luke isn’t afraid to have been brought here, not when he is more than capable of defending himself, but he is surprised. They stop at a door and Luke can read from the sign posted on it in seven different languages that it’s the sort of place that rents by the hour. There is a Zabrak working the front desk behind a blaster-proof shield. His horned head doesn’t so much as raise from the holodrama he’s watching as he growls out: “Rates are on the wall.”

Oh, kark. This is really happening.

“I can— “ Luke starts, reaching toward his belt but is stopped by a gloved hand in his wrist.

“Save your money,” the Madalorian says, voice even as it ever is. If his feelings are rolling through him in a dizzying blob of want and nerves and shock and anticipation like Luke’s are he certainly doesn’t sound like it. “I’ll take care of it. I’m about to come into some credits soon.”

Luke’s laugh comes out airy, high, and maybe with a touch of hysteria. It only makes this whole situation more unbelievable—more ridiculous and mind blowing and exciting—that his own bounty is going to be paying for…. Well. Whatever it is that they are going to be doing here. Together.

The Mandalorian lays out a handful of coin with a clack and then also points to a barrier and a packet of lube in a display behind the desk, right next to the tiny sewing kits and the individually wrapped bacta plasters.

“Have fun,” the Zabark deadpans as he powers down the shield enough to pass over the stuff. His yellow eyes barely flicker to Luke before he’s drawn back to his holodrama. Still it’s enough for Luke’s cheeks to ignite in a blush that threatens to turn supernova.

But then there’s a gloved hand on his shoulder pushing him through the hall to a room that he opens with a swipe card and all the blood that had been warming his face spills into his belly.

“So, what should I call you?” Luke asks through a mouth gone dry at the sound of the door to their rented room whooshing shut. 

“Mando works.”

And Luke doesn’t know what he was expecting, exactly, but somehow he’s disappointed. But then the Mandalorian— _Mando_ —brings his hands up and the breath dissolves in Luke’s lungs so fast it’s like he’s been spaced as the beskar on one of Mando’s forearms is stripped away by a capable hand. Once that’s done Mando works a black and tan glove off to reveal the pale skin of fingers that may very well have lived a lifetime hidden away behind leather.

Luke’s chin is caught between two fingers that are soft and human. His face is tilted up to meet his own reflection in the sharp lines of a silver helmet. A thumb strokes the dimple in his chin and he can’t see Mando’s eyes but he knows he’s being examined. Probably taking in the blue of Luke’s eyes because, really, that is the most remarkable thing about his face and so that’s usually where moments like this go.

“Pretty,” Mando finally says and it’s not quite a compliment, more like he’s stating a fact. The thumb moves up to rest against Luke’s bottom lip, which is as close to a kiss as they are likely to share, so Luke decides to make the most of it.

Opening his mouth, Luke takes Mando’s thumb into his mouth. He can taste traces of leather and the faintest tang of sweat when he swirls his tongue around the warm press of it. He can taste it even better when he sucks sharply, letting his cheeks hollow, and when Mando pulls his hand away he lets it go with a wet pop.

“Well, Mando,” Luke says with a brash smile, the one that can make even Han go pale over what fresh disaster Luke is about to get himself involved in. “How do you want to do this?”

“Take off your clothes. Get on the bed.”

There is absolutely no reason those dispassionate words, warped and clipped by a voice mod, should be as sexy as they are, and yet Luke is punched in the solar plexus by what they do to him. Mando turns away to slide the disruptor rifle he’s been wearing strapped to his back off his shoulder and leans it against the wall before removing the rest of his weaponry. 

Maybe not _all_ of his weaponry, since Luke has no idea how much the other man is wearing, but there is an arsenal accumulating steadily on the wobbly, three-legged side table. By comparison the single lightsaber that hangs from Luke’s belt is almost laughable, but he takes off his poncho and sets it carefully in the folds where Mando won't be able to see it on the off chance he is some kind of expert on the weapons of nearly-extinct sects of galactic protectors. 

The rest of Luke’s clothes come off quickly, and it must say something about his eagerness that Luke is naked while Mando is still finding more weapons to remove. Sitting on the edge of the bed he waits, trying not to swing his legs impatiently.

“Here,” Mando says, tossing the foil-edged lube packet without so much as looking in his direction. Luke catches it easily. “Open yourself up.”

Mando turns back to his pile of weapons and Luke tries to wait him out, but the bounty hunter isn’t paying him any attention. Instead he fiddles with some armor and looks for all the world like there isn’t a naked man perched on a cheap motel mattress waiting for him. 

“Do you even want to do this?” Luke asks, curious.

“Why?” Mando counters. “Second thoughts?”

“No,” Luke says quickly. “Not at all, I’m just confused, I guess.”

The sigh that Mando gives is loud enough to be picked up by his helmet’s modulator, which tells Luke quite a bit about the severity of _that_ particular emotion. “I don’t usually do this sort of thing.”

“Oh,” Luke says. He gives himself a moment to take that in, to rearrange what he’d thought he’d known about the bounty hunter with the man that is actually in front of him, and winds up the other side of it with a smile. “Then, since it seems like I’m the one that’s done this the most between the two of us, let me tell you that instead of standing all the way across the room it’s way more fun if you actually get close to the guy you’re planning on fucking.”

At the word _fucking_ Mando’s head snaps up.

Luke tears the lube packet open with his teeth and squeezes the slick out onto the fingers of his left hand as he leans back.

“Come here,” Luke says, propping a foot onto the bed, tilting his pelvis to make sure that Mando has a good view before he starts to push his fingers inside of himself. “I want you to see what’s going to be yours—and only yours—for the next hour.”

Mando keeps most of his armor on, but Luke doesn’t mind. It’s kind of hot, to be naked against all that beskar, even if it is easier to see the dents from repelled blaster fire and the places where russet paint has started flaking away when he’s got his legs thrown over Mando’s shoulders.

By the time Mando comes Luke is on his elbows and knees, still trembling through the aftershocks of his own orgasm. If the Mandalorian makes a sound, it’s too soft to filter through his helmet. He does go still, though, and Luke braces himself for Mando to withdraw but instead he stays where he is, their bodies joined even as his hardness starts to fade away.

The press of steel between Luke’s shoulder blades is so unexpected it makes him gasp. His skin prickles in goosebumps as the warmth of it is greeted by the chill of Mando’s helmet. There’s something vulnerable about Mando in that moment, and Luke can feel his heart flip over strangely. He’s got a hand pressed to Luke’s hip and Luke shifts, balancing carefully, until he can reach back with his own gloved hand to touch it.

“You okay?” Luke asks, softly, like he’s afraid of startling the guy away.

“Yeah,” comes the reply. “Just give me a minute.”

He feels a little ridiculous telling him “Take your time” in this position, but Luke does mean it and maybe Mando can hear some of that in his voice because he stays put.

It’s only when a staticky comm turns on and the growling, bored voice of the Zabrak at the front desk warns that they only have ten minutes left or else they’ll have to pay for another full hour whether they use it or not, that he pulls out. 

“Thanks,” Mando says at last into the quiet once they’ve both pulled their things back on: Mando his weapons and Luke his clothes. 

“No problem. You seem—” Sad, Luke thinks. Lonely, but they don’t know each other well enough for Luke to say either of those things. “Tired.”

“Yeah. I guess I am. Okay, Skywalker,” Mando says, drawing himself up and squaring off his shoulders. He unclips a pair of cuffs from where they are hanging off his newly buckled belt. “Your choice. I can bring you in warm or I can bring you in cold.”

Luke can’t help it. He laughs.

“I like that one,” he says as the durasteel closes tight around his wrists. “You should use it more often.”

Peli is probably going to kill him, for letting himself get picked up by a bounty hunter, again, and leaving his X-Wing in her hangar, again, but he can’t seem to worry about that right now.

Instead, Luke lets himself be led back to Mando’s ship. No one in Mos Eisley gives so much as a second glance to the Mandalorian bounty hunter and his bound quarry. Once inside the ship, Luke even steps into the carbonite chamber on his own with no pushing required.

It feels like the least he can do. The Mandalorian really does seem tired.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

The screaming pull of a child’s need comes through the Force and it’s so loud that Luke immediately shoots up to standing and slams his head into the top paneling of the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s internal comport that he’s been working under.

“Fuck, kid, what’d you go and do that for?” Han shouts from somewhere out in the main cabin.

Luke can’t answer; he can only clutch his head as he’s battered about by both his own physical pain and the tendrils of someone else’s metaphysical anguish. It goes on and on, washing over in waves that Luke barely surfaces from before being pulled back under. He might be yelling back, at this point he isn’t sure. 

_Find me,_ it calls in no language and every language and it slips beneath his skin, burrowing somewhere deep and undeniable. When it finally fades away he shimmies out of the narrow crawl space to find Han and Chewie staring down at him.

“Do I need to check for a concussion?” Han asks suspiciously and Chewie growls his own concern. 

“No, I’m fine,” Luke says, his voice comes out as distant as that cry he can still hear echoing through the void of space. “I’ve gotta go.”

“Go?” Han shouts after him as Luke hurries off the Falcon’s ramp toward where his X-Wing is docked beside it. “Don’t tell me you think you’re gonna be flying anywhere when you’re barely walking straight. Come on, get back here, let me at least give you a ride.”

“Can’t,” Luke shouts back, grateful to see Artoo shooting off the _Falcon_ ’s ramp past Chewie to get to Luke’s side. “I gotta do this on my own.”

“Do what?”

“I don’t kriffing know,” Luke shouts back. “But it’s important. I can feel it.”

Whatever Han is muttering to himself doesn’t make it to where Luke is clambering up a ladder to his starfighter’s cockpit, though he’s sure there’s something in there about dank farrik Jedi and their dank farrik feelings.

Which. Fair.

It is, after all, Luke's dank farrik Jedi feelings that are leading them blind through the galaxy. Whenever Artoo tries to whistle for a better set of coordinates Luke has no answer for him.

"Just, forward. That's all I know. Somewhere out there."

They wind up on the planet Tython. Luke has been here before, seeking out answers to the questions that have plagued him about his own existence, but he’s never seen it like this. The gentle hum of the Living Force is scarred where stormtrooper bodies litter the rocky landscape and blaster bolts cut across boulders like tears.

Luke stands among what he can only assume is the wreckage of a ship. The scattered debris is so obliterated it feels wrong to even call it rubble. It's pure destruction, and Luke can't shake this sinking feeling that he _knows_ this ship.

Artoo is curious when Luke picks his way over the fallen troopers back to the X-Wing. Luke can only shake his head.

"I don't know what happened. Whatever it was we're too late."

A mournful hum sounds and Luke pats the droid's domed top affectionately. "Yeah. I know. But I'm not ready to give up yet. I say we keep looking."

The child's call is faint now. Still, it wraps around Luke’s skin—the thinnest of Cyrene silk threads—that he's careful not to snap as he follows its light pull. 

Ceding the controls to Artoo, Luke sinks into a deep meditation, surfacing only enough to mutter out directions before falling back into that half-life where everything shines with purpose.

"Almost there," he maybe says, maybe only thinks, as they flash by worlds and stars. The whispers of Jedi past offer him blessings and well wishes, fortifying him with their strength for his mission, as he passes through their plane. "Hang in there, youngling, I'm almost there."

He rouses when his X-Wing’s comm turns on, a woman’s voice says “Incoming craft identify yourself.” He hears it but he can’t reply. The Force is binding to him too tightly. He is barely even conscious of himself as an individual as he dons his black cape and pulls the hood over his head. He is an instrument. A tool. A weapon. He is all of the Jedi before him and he has come to safeguard their future. 

There are droids, sleek and deadly, that he barely sees as he cuts past their forces.

He can hear the child now, so close, and he can feel the moment when the child hears him, too.

Finally there’s nothing between them except a pair of cratered doors. When they open he steps in and powers down his glowing green lightsaber. 

A Mandalorian in the shiniest beskar Luke has ever seen speaks and his voice is familiar. Luke is too busy to think about that, though, as he casts out a line toward the youngling and waits for a response. In the here and now only the child matters—everything else passes by like sand trickling through his fingers.

“Come, little one,” he says. The child hesitates, looking instead to the Mandalorian, and the space between the two of them ignites with a warmth, a love, that skims the air like the first ray of sunlight across an empty, black ocean. 

“He doesn’t want to go with you,” the Mandalorian says and it’s true. He doesn’t. 

In the end it’s Artoo, rolling in behind Luke that does more to convince the child to leave than Luke can manage on his own. Luke is grateful for the droid, because truth be told he isn’t totally sure what he’s saying or doing at that point. The child—Grogu, he can hear from the child’s thoughts—had called and Luke had answered and it isn’t until he’s sitting in the cockpit of his starfighter with coordinates plugged in for Yavin IV’s moon that Luke is starting to feel more like himself rather than a handy vessel for the Force to work through.

Luke looks down at the child in his lap, blinking away the last traces of the fugue that had taken him over. There isn’t much room in the X-Wing’s cockpit, so it's a good thing that the youngling is so small.

“Hey,” he says with a smile and Grogu’s green ears tip back with curiosity. “I’m Luke Skywalker, by the way.”

The child doesn’t have much interest in Luke after that, though he does manage to twist the bulb off of one of the starfighter’s stick shifts. Luke watches it float into a three fingered hand with amusement. It keeps Grogu distracted for a little while.

They are halfway through their jump to Yavin when Luke feels the youngling's thoughts turn back to the man they’d left behind on the star cruiser’s bridge.

“Your dad seems nice,” Luke offers tentatively. His experience with children is pretty limited--and he can safely say that he’s never taken care of a fifty-year-old toddler before--but this seems like a safe topic of conversation. “He has kind eyes.”

The child in his lap gurgles in agreement.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

Somehow it’s Boba Fett of all beings that gets Luke in touch with Grogu’s dad again.

Fett doesn’t want to help him, of course. Not after all the bad blood that’s been spilled between them, especially with the sarlacc pit thing from a few years back, and there’s a lot of the holocomm where the blue flicker of Fett’s image is silent with his arms crossed while Luke has to practically crawl on his belly to get him to take the call, let alone _listen_ to Luke, let alone relent enough to give Luke a name.

Just a name.

“Come on, Fett, that’s all I’m asking for.”

“Wow, Skywalker. You really fucked up this time, didn’t you?”

And Luke has to agree that yes, he did indeed fuck up though in his defense he was riding high on the Force at the time, but that’s not something that’s likely to sway Fett one way or the other so he goes the meek route, saying quietly: “I really did. Will you help me?”

Fett’s helmet tilts to the side, like maybe he’s finally considering it, and Luke is a deft enough swordsman these days to press an advantage when he sees one. 

“Not even for my sake. For his son’s.”

Fett’s sigh is loud enough to be picked up on his voice modulator on Tatooine, travel through the shared holocomm connection—in one end of the outer rim and out the other—to finally make itself heard in the communications room on Yavin IV’s moon.

“Din Djarin,” comes the terse reply before the connection is abruptly cut off from Fett’s end.

Which isn’t much to go on, considering all he knows is his name and that he’s a Mandalorian, but it _is_ a start.

As it turns out, it’s more than enough because not only is Din Djarin _a_ Mandalorian, he’s _the_ Mandalorian.

“I didn’t realize you came from royalty,” Luke says to Grogu not a little bit stunned as they wait for someone to find the Mand'alor and patch their comm through.

After that it’s a lot of back and forth to strategize a time when he’s able to fly over between all the things he’s gotta do as a king trying to reunify his home sector.

The ship that finally settles down in front of the temple is more of a junker than Luke would expect from a king. The paint is peeling, some of the stabilizer flaps are slow to retract, and there’s a groan when the ramp extends that makes the spacerhead in Luke itch to grab some oil and go to town on those hinges.

Instead Luke stays where he is and when he spots the shine of pure, silver beskar coming down the ramp he falls into a bow which he’s only mastered thanks to extensive holocomming with Leia as she berated him over his pisspoor form while he yelled back that he grew up a _farmer_ for druk’s sake when was he supposed to learn this sithspit king-greeting nonsense?

“You don’t have to do that,” comes a soft voice and Luke looks up in time to see that Grogu has raced ahead with his arms raised to be picked up. In a clean motion that speaks of a body honed for movement he sweeps down and takes Grogu in his arms. “Hey, kid. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”

Luke intends to make himself scarce for this reunion which has been a long time coming, but is stopped when the Mand’alor starts asking Luke questions about Grogu’s training, about how he spends his days, what he’s been eating, how he’s been sleeping, if he’s been behaving…

“He’s been a joy to have here, Lord Djarin,” Luke says and it earns him a long, silent look.

“I think you can call me Din, all things considered,” he says before setting Grogu down so that he can dig into his belt’s pouch. “Anyway, I brought presents.”

Grogu’s face turns incandescent when he sees the silver ball that Din plucks from his hip. The sound he makes is nothing short of pure elation and Luke has to laugh alongside the gentle chuckle that comes through Din’s helmet.

“Ah, yes. The famous silver ball,” Luke grins. “I hear Grogu thinking about it all the time, I’m happy he’s finally reunited with it.”

Grogu insists on dragging Din around to show his father his favorite places around the Temple’s grounds, and his enthusiasm is catching. Luke trails along, offering commentary that this is the boulder Grogu had managed to lift through the Force two weeks ago, there was the meadow where he’d been able to deflect his first training droid bolt with Luke’s lightsaber, here is the lake where they’ve been watching the tadpoles gradually grow legs. Settling on a log to watch as Grogu chases a pair frogs along the lake’s muddy shoreline, Luke can feel the weight of Din’s thoughts even if he can’t see their exact shape.

“And you don’t worry about that?” Din asks, voice so withdrawn it could almost be mistaken for shy. “All these attachments he’s got going on? The ball and, well, me? You don’t think it’ll get in the way of his training?”

Luke can only shrug.

“I guess it could, but seeing as I talk to my sister and my brother-in-law nearly every other day it would be awfully hypocritical of me to stop Grogu from forming attachments, himself.”

Din is silent at that, considering, as Luke continues on: “I’ve read some of what the Jedi used to believe, and honestly I have no idea if they had the right idea or not. Their way led to the fall of one of their own who in turn brought down the entire Order. Would things have been different if he’d been allowed to love more freely?” He breaks off to watch Grogu, now bored with the frogs, float the silver ball through the air in a lazy curling pattern.

The last afternoon sun catches at the smooth surface and turns the ball gold along the edges.

“I’d like to think it would. So I’m not planning on holding myself away from that sort of love on the off chance that it might actually be the thing that maintains balance in the Force, and I could hardly hold my student to a different standard. That wouldn’t be fair.”

“I see,” Din says and the simple words lay between them in a complicated tangle. “Well, if that's the way of it, then, here: I brought you something, too,” he says at last and reaches back to his belt.

Years of politeness pressed into him by Aunt Beru at the moisture farm have Luke saying “You didn't have to do that” before Din has so much as taken his hand out of his belt’s pouch, which is just as well since the moment he gets a look at what’s in Din’s hand his heart stutters to a halt in his chest so that it can jump into his throat.

“No,” Luke says, eyes wide, while a cold, dawning understanding creeps across his skin and he can only stare at the bounty puck that glints silver in Din’s gloved palm.

“I can bring you in warm...” Din is saying and Luke can’t hear the rest because he’s blushing so hard now that the blood is landing in his ears, making a high-pitched, tinny whine that drowns out the words he knows by heart because he’s spent the better part of the last few years thinking about them with his hand on his cock.

“Oh, no,” Luke whispers sickly. “What—”

_No, no, no. Oh, sweet Force no._

His voice, Luke realizes. He should have known him from his voice. Even if the beskar is different, his voice is still very much the same.

“You really didn't recognize me?” Din asks when Luke’s hands come up to cover his face, for all the good it does to hide him from the Mandalorian. 

_The_ Mandalorian.

Mando. 

_Din._

Luke laughs helplessly. Horrified. “I wasn't myself on the cruiser,” he whispers at last.

“Yeah no kidding. I didn't realize who you were until you'd left.” Din has clearly had longer to sit with this revelation because he sounds amused, fond even, while Luke is still reeling. “I don’t think I've ever seen you that serious, not even when you were in carbonite.”

“I wasn’t myself,” is all Luke can say again. Din takes pity on him and lets Luke breathe through the worst of it without saying a word, his helmet turned toward Grogu while Luke sorts through the shattered mess this has broken him into.

“You've changed,” Luke says when he starts to feel whole enough to think in such things as words and sentences.

“I’m still tired,” Din says with a huffing laugh.

“Maybe.” Luke feels braver now. He raises his face to look at Din and in the beskar reflection of Din’s helmet Luke can see his cheeks are now only slightly pink. “But not nearly so lonely.”

“Ah. Yeah.” Din concedes with a nod. “I was different, back then. Grogu changed me, I think”

“Yeah,” Luke nods along with him. “Yeah, I think he did.”

Sensing that they are watching him, Grogu toddles back to Din and lifts his arms to be picked up. This time when he gets close enough, Grogu’s hands come to the sides of Din’s helmet. It isn’t a demand, more of a wide-eyed question, and Din doesn’t need the Force to sense what is being asked of him.

Luke hadn’t known, before, that Grogu had never seen Din’s face until that moment on Gideon’s cruiser. He hadn’t known how much that act of quite literally laying himself bare for Grogu had cost Din. Luke knows it now, from all the times he’s seen the flashes of Din go by in Grogu’s memories and he realizes it now, with a rekindling of his blush, from the memory that Din hadn’t removed his helmet in that hour they two had spent in a stained room on Tatooine. 

“Let me leave the two of you alone,” Luke offers, clambering to his feet, gaze averted.

“It’s okay,” Din says. “You've seen it already.”

“Oh. I mean,” he stammers, staring at the green foliage, the insects that are looping through the dappled oranges of sunset, the ripples of water that skim the surface of the lake... really at anything but Din. “Yeah, I have, but--”

“Unless you'd rather I keep it on.” Din’s voice is different now. Softer, for having taken his helmet off, and the sound of it does something to Luke. It makes him shiver, this transformation from hard-shelled warrior to someone far more human. “Some people have a thing for it and I know how much you liked it on before.”

His eyes are nearly black in the fading day’s light when Luke snaps his face around to meet them. They harbor a glint that Luke stares at suspiciously. “You're teasing me aren't you?”

Somewhere among the rugged stubble on his cheeks and the dark lines of his mustache a smile quirks at the corner of Din’s mouth. “Yeah. I am.”

Luke’s heart beats triple time as he stares at Din’s mouth before letting his gaze skim along the vulnerable curves of Din’s face. Luke’s fingers yearn to stretch the space between them until he can trace the kindness of Din’s expression. He wants so badly to run his fingertips through the fall of Din’s hair where it sticks to the sweaty skin of his forehead.

“Because if you would want to do—you know— _that_ again.” Luke is _very_ aware that there is a child present that is taking in what they are saying with big, green ears and huge, shining eyes. “With or without the helmet. If you’d like to do that again. I would be...you know, I'd like that.”

“Yeah,” Din smiles, and this time it is a true smile, one that stretches across his face, casting a glow that Luke can’t help but reflect back with a hopeful, happy, probably somewhat idiotic grin of his own. “I'd like that too.”


	6. Chapter 6

+1

Luke wakes up alone, but he knew that he would.

For all that Luke has the Force on his side, it’s nothing compared to a careful, soft-footed Din that is determined not to bother Luke when he has to leave. The sun hasn’t even cleared the horizon outside Luke’s window and he knows that Din is long gone by now since he’d said he needed to get off Yavin’s moon before the chrono changed from night to day.

Luke lets his fingers idly drift down his chest, his hips, and lazily circle his cock, the cool of his beskar bracer trailing in his hand’s wake. Not to start anything, really, just to press the lingering memories of Din’s touch into his skin. Like that could hold the traces of him there for just a little longer.

Closing his eyes, Luke can almost sense that steady, even shape that he’s come to know as Din’s light in the Force. He can nearly fool himself into believing that Din hasn’t left at all, which is ridiculous because Luke knows that he has, and there’s little point in getting weird about it now. 

Stolen hours. Brief meals. The occasional diplomatic function. The occasional call for a Jedi to guard the Mand’alor’s back when the diplomatic function dissolves into violence because these are Mandalorians, after all…. This is what their lives have become from the moment that that rusted-out heap of Din’s had landed in front of the temple. It hasn’t changed much through the years as Din’s thrown himself helmet-first into unifying the broken, bleeding fragments of Mandalore’s once vast empire.

This is how it is, how it has to be.

“This is the Way.” Luke says wryly into his empty, echoing room, before sighing and rolling off his bed to throw on some clothes.

Humidity builds across Luke’s forehead well before he makes it outside.

He can feel Grogu still sleeping when he passes by the youngling's room, so Luke tells Artoo to keep an eye on him before heading for the temple’s wide entrance.

After a childhood spent in the desert’s cracking heat he’s come to appreciate the wet weight of Yavin’s air as it settles heavy in his lungs. He likes it best of all in these early hours, when he can find a spot to meditate among the rustling leaves and the flitting insects before the sun turns the air into a thick, sludgy soup and the work of the day really begins.

Luke is still deciding where he should go when he sees that Din has, in fact, never left.

Worry prickles behind his ears, but the tendril of Force that Luke sends into the _Mudhorn_ doesn’t find Din hurt or unconscious or any number of terrible things that Luke can bring to mind.

He just feels tired.

So Luke is more curious than anything when he holds out his hand to send some of his power into the ship to disengage the ramp. It lowers without a single creak or groan, and Luke is pretty smug about that. The work they’d done to the _Mudhorn_ hadn’t been easy, but it had been satisfying to be elbow-deep in ship repairs by Din’s side. Drifting tools into his hand before he so much as asked. Grinning at Din’s wide eyes when he realized that Luke could rewire the internal port cables by touch alone, thank you very much— _I’m not just a pretty face, Din_ —and laughing as Din chased Grogu away from the russet hull paint the kid so desperately wanted to taste.

Luke finds Din in the cockpit, sitting in the pilot’s seat. He doesn’t look up from where he’s staring at the helmet in his lap, too lost in whatever it is that is etching a frown across his forehead. Luke maneuvers around the narrow space until he can run his thumb against the warmth of Din’s temple and trace the contours of his face with a delicate touch.

“What are you doing?” Luke asks quietly. Carefully. Din only sighs, weariness clinging to the lines near his eyes, and he turns his face so that he can wordlessly press his lips against the mudhorn signet on Luke’s bracer. “I thought you had to be out before daybreak?”

“Change of plans.”

“Oh yeah? What happened?” Luke leans a hip against the console, mindful not to knock any of the controls when he does.

“Nothing."

Luke blinks, waiting for more, but Din has gone silent.

Din and his silences. They could last until the last star burned from the sky if Luke weren't around to pester him out of them. This one feels different, though, so Luke lets him have it until he’s ready to speak again.

"I didn’t want to leave," Din confesses at last.

“So. Wait,” Luke shakes his head, trying to follow the pathways of Din’s thoughts and for once finding the way blocked. He’s not consciously keeping Luke out, more like Din isn’t sure of what he’s thinking, himself. “Where have you been this whole time?”

“Here. Just sitting here.”

“Huh.” Well, that's… different. Unexpected, really. Especially from Din, whose sense of duty is so finely honed that Luke’s personally seen him take bolts of blaster fire on more than one occasion when he thought it would get him to his meeting with Mandolore’s new senators faster.

"What?"

"Nothing," Luke says, crossing his arms and propping a foot on Din’s seat beside his hip. "I'm thinking."

It's pretty funny how impatient Din is for the silence to end now that he’s facing a pensive Luke for a change, but Luke needs to get his thoughts in order on this one. It's too important— _Din_ is too important—to kriff things up by charging ahead blindly.

"Maybe,” Luke hesitates, though it needs to be said. “Maybe it's just time?"

“What are you talking about?” 

“Mandalore is about as stable as you can hope to make it, all things considered. Maybe you should go ahead and get your ass kicked by Bo-Katan. Let her take the darksaber, and all of the responsibilities that go with it. You've done enough.” Luke turns his foot so that it can tap Din’s hip, cajoling and fond. “You've done _more_ than enough.”

Din leans back in his seat, closing his eyes for too long to be mistaken for a blink but not long enough to register as defeat. “But there's still more to do.”

“There will always be more to do, but you're not alone. Not anymore. You don’t have to hold it all together by yourself.”

There are some silences that Din falls into where it doesn’t matter whether he’s wearing a helmet or not, his face is just as unreadable either way. This is one of them. Luke wants to touch him in that moment so badly but he knows that whatever Din is thinking is too important for distractions.

“Anyway,” Luke says lightly after a time. “You don’t have to decide all that right now. I think maybe for today you just need a break. Like, what are you supposed to be doing on Mandalore today?” 

“We’re signing treaties all week.”

“Are they important treaties?”

“I don't even know anymore.”

There’s something bleak that hovers in the pinched grooves of Din’s mouth and Luke fights to keep the worry out of his voice. “So that doesn’t sound like something you need to be there to do. Be a king. Pull rank. Comm Bo-Katan and tell her you won't be coming and if there’s anything that needs your attention she can bring them over here herself. She certainly knows where to find you,” Luke grins, remembering the last time she’d been dragged on a side trip to the Jedi temple because Din had found out Grogu had a fever that Luke had no other strategy for dealing with but to keep him in a healing trance until it finally faded away.

“I won’t abandon Mandalore,” Din says, voice a rumble of seriousness, eyes dark with the weight of all he's willing to endure to satisfy his unrelenting code of honor.

“It’s not abdicating to take a break. You’re just going to stay here with me for a bit. Help me keep Grogu from eating all of Yavin’s aquatic life." Luke taps his hip again with his foot, teasing. "Maybe even meditate.”

Din snorts. “Isn’t that just a fancy, Jedi way of taking a nap?”

“Only one way to find out,” Luke grins brightly, not taking offense in the slightest. “Come on. Stay a few days. Let me finally teach you to meditate, you coward.”

“Yeah. Okay,” he relents. “That sounds good.”

Luke leans in to kiss Din’s cheek where it is the smoothest before he takes Din’s helmet from his lax hands and slides it onto his head. When Din makes the call, he’s careful to keep out of holo range, but he does hold Din’s hand the whole time he’s speaking to a clipped-voiced and obviously irritated Bo-Katan.

Oh, yeah. She’d gladly take the opportunity to kick Din’s ass a few rounds if given the chance, Luke notes with a smirk.

When the comm is done, Din snatches his hand back so that he can rip his helmet off. Like he can't stand to be wearing it one click more. His breathing is fast and Luke isn’t sure what’s going on with that, but the good news is Din is staying. They have some time now, and maybe it’ll even be enough to sort through this strange mood that Din is lost to.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?”

The laugh that sputters from Din comes out like he’s amused despite himself. “Easy for you to say. I noticed you stayed where she couldn’t see you.”

“Oh, well, that was strategic." Luke waves a careless hand in the air, and is glad to see Din's face settle into something approaching normal. "Didn’t want her to get distracted if she saw me, since, you know: Jedi and Mandalorians. We’re mortal enemies and all that.”

“Uh huh.”

“Also, she’s kind of intense. And really good with a blaster.”

“She can’t shoot you through a comm unit.”

“Well, if anyone could do it...” Luke trails off and is rewarded by Din’s laugh—a real one, this time—the kind that sweeps the legs out from under Luke until he’s grinning and helpless against it, too.

“Here,” Luke offers, when it subsides and Din’s looking about as close to happy as he can get when the skin below his eyes is so dark with exhaustion. “Let me help you get a little more comfortable.”

And because he knows it will make that smile on Din’s face stick around a little longer, Luke is sure to name each of the parts of Din’s armor as he takes them off of him. Din’s been trying to get Luke to learn the difference between a vambrace and a pauldron for years now, and this time as he sets Din’s beskar aside one piece at a time, Luke nearly gets it all right.

“There,” Luke says when he’s finally done and Din’s warm body is only covered by soft things. 

Once Din’s gloves are peeled off he starts touching Luke and Luke is more than happy to let him. A hand reaches to tilt Luke’s face down so that Din can better see it from where he sits. “What are you smiling about?”

Luke shrugs. “I like what I see."

“And what do you see?” Din asks as he catches Luke by the wrists and pulls him closer.

“What I always see,” he answers truthfully. “A Mandalorian. My riduur. Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum.”

“Your accent is terrible,” Din laughs, but there’s a spark to his dark eyes that lets Luke know that his efforts to learn Mando’a haven’t been completely wasted. “Whose been teaching you?”

Boba Fett, actually. The last time Luke went down to Tatooine he'd stopped in to thank him for his help in finding Din, one thing had led to another, and they ended up getting incredibly drunk together. Luke showed him holo after holo of Grogu while Fett taught him phrases in Mando’a.

That had continued—or devolved, as Han grumbled when he’d heard about it—into semi-weekly comms, and who knew Fett had such a thing for poetry?

Luke’s been waiting for the right time to spring this particular surprise on Din, and so he tries a verse out now, knowing full well he’s mangling the language even without feeling the shudder that falls across Din’s body at the first word from Luke’s lips.

“O'r te uur be Ka'ra—” 

Din’s eyes widen with horror as he whispers: “Oh, no.”

“—O'r te dral be beskar, o'r te kaab be te akaanir—”

“No,” Din snickers. “Please, no.”

“—o'r te dinui be tal, Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum.”

“Quit it. Please, I’m begging you.”

Luke spares him the rest of the poem and instead laughs into the hollows of his lips: “Dinui. My Dinui. My gift.”

Broad palms bracket his face and Luke loses himself to the feel of Din’s mouth as it slots against his, always warm, always perfect, always his.

“You are Mandalorian, with or without your armor. You are Mandalorian with or without your throne,” Luke tells him when they need to come up for air and he might be breathless but it doesn’t make him any less sincere. “Like I would be a Jedi whether I had a lightsaber or not. It’s about who we are, not what we have.” 

“Mmm,” Din agrees, and this time their kiss becomes a needy, wanting, seeking thing. 

“What are you thinking?” Luke asks when Din pulls away from his mouth so that he can bring their foreheads together.

“I’m thinking,” Din says, humor lining the spaces of his words. “That my riduur is beautiful and wise and far better than I deserve.”

“Good thing your riduur has such terrible taste in men,” Luke teases and Din kisses him across an eyebrow. 

“It’s a very good thing.”

Din’s hand drifts between their bodies and he goes a little crazy when he feels Din’s bare fingers work their into his pants to close around his cock. Making a desperate, keening sound, Luke bucks into Din’s grip as he peppers kisses up and down Din’s neck.

“Force, I love you,” Luke says fervently. Wildly. “Tell me what you need from me, Din. Anything. I'll do it.”

From the edges of his vision Luke can see Din’s face crease in a frown, because as much as Luke worries about Din and his kriffing, unyielding, beskar-strong notions of duty, he knows that Din worries about Luke’s whole-hearted impulsivity just as often.

“You know that’s a dangerous promise to make.”

“Not when I make it to you.” Luke slides his fingers into Din’s hair, holding on as he rocks his hips and he can feel Din starting to get hard beneath him. “Anything. I'd do anything for you. I mean it.”

“I know you do, cyar'ika.”

“Tell me what you want. Please,” Luke begs as Din’s hand finds a twist to his downstroke that knocks the breath from his lungs.

“Right now I want impossible things,” Din admits. “But I’d settle for sex. Here. In the cockpit.” 

"Oh, Din," he sighs so happily that Din laughs and Luke has to catch that laugh on his tongue, to chase the vibrations of it until they rest in the corners of his own smile. "From the moment you towed me by a cable onto your ship, that’s all I’ve ever wanted from you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:  
>  **riduur** \- spouse  
>  **Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum** \- I love you  
>  **dinui** \- gift  
>  **cyar'ika** \- darling, sweetheart
> 
> And then this absolute masterpiece of a fragmented poem that was written for me by the incandescent, incomparable [tessiete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessiete/pseuds/tessiete) who didn't hesitate when I cried at her that I can't write poetry in English, much less Mando'a:  
>  **O'r te uur be Ka'ra, o'r te dral be beskar, o'r te kaab be te akaanir, o'r te dinui be tal, Ni kar'tayl gar darasuum**  
>  In the silence of stars, in the burnish of steel, in the din of the fight, in the giving of blood, I love you.
> 
> Thank you so SO much everyone for reading and all your amazing enthusiasm along the way. If you want to find me on tumblr I'm at [DarkIsRising](https://darkisrising.tumblr.com/) where I'm always looking for new friends, so come and say hey :-)


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